Budweiser and Visa headline the growing list of large consumer brands buying and promoting NFTs over the past week.
Budweiser has proudly hopped aboard the NFT train, and it isn’t the one massive identify doing it this week.
The beer giant on Tuesday changed its Twitter profile to a hand-drawn beer rocket NFT that it purchased for 8 ETH (about $26,000), and it also registered an Ethereum domain identify beer. eth, for 30 ETH (nearly $100,000). The NFT was designed by artist Tom Sachs as part of the Rocket Factory NFT series.
Budweiser is just the latest household name over the previous few days to signal its adoption of NFTs, unique blockchain-based tokens that may represent all types of bodily or digital media, including artworks, video clips, or music.
On Monday, payments giant Visa made headlines after it paid $165,000 for a CryptoPunk, one of a collection of 10,000 pixelated avatars from 2017. CryptoPunks are actually promoting for millions of dollars every day, and Visa’s announcement made it clear that Visa considers its CryptoPunk to be artwork: “Over the last 60 years, Visa has built a group of historic commerce artifacts – from early paper credit cards to the zip-zap machine. Today, as we enter a new period of NFT-commerce, Visa welcomes CryptoPunk #7610 to our collection,” Visa tweeted.
And on Friday, Arizona Iced Tea announced that it had bought a Bored Ape NFT from the red-hot Bored Ape Yacht Club collection. The beverage model plans to use its Ape in its advertising supplies. (Yuga Labs, the collection’s creator, later instructed that Arizona Iced Tea used its brand logo in an “inappropriate” manner in its tweet, an indication that interesting copyright disputes will likely soon arise in the NFT world.)
All of it provides up a clear sign that this second wave of the NFT boom is different from March and April when brands like Charmin, Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut were rushing to put out their own NFTs depicting their very own merchandise. Visa shopping for an NFT from a current scorching assortment exhibits that a main bank card firm—one that’s extraordinarily cautious about aligning its model with any associate—sees creative worth, monetary acquire, and optimistic status profit from embracing CryptoPunks.
Visa desires entry to the NFT community, which might be taken as an optimistic signal for Visa’s future embrace of crypto in general. The identical goes for Budweiser registering a .eth domain name.
Whereas NFT prices may certainly plummet again, what deep-pocketed brands do in the NFT space could have a more lasting effect: How quickly will we see manufacturers paying licensing charges to owners of high-profile rare NFTs? And which big brand will be next to buy in?
